Supported by a 2012 RWU Presidents Inclusive Excellence Fund Grant to Dean Stephen White, SAAHP launched its Womens Leadership Network (WLN) at Alumni Weekend on June 9, 2012, in a session attended by 20+ graduates who returned to RWU, along with SAAHP deans and university leaders. The session focused on issues and potentials achievable through establishing womens’ leadership connections from K-12 through undergraduate and graduate school, alumni in the early part of their careers as well as senior professionals. Women students in SAAHP disciplines across the country are highly successful as students, yet are less represented in number and professional achievements than their early academic success would indicate.

Associate Professor of Art Elizabeth Duffy is the recipient of two fellowships during her 2012/13 sabbatical. Duffy is currently Artist-in-Residence on Governor’s Island in New York through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space program. During her Swing Space residency at Governors Island, Duffy will develop installations using sources from the grand homes on the island and the patterns from security envelopes of corporations across the bay. Find out more about Duffy’s work here at www.lmcc.net/residencies/swingspace/current_artists.

Visiting Professor Vikram Bhatt, Professor and Director of McGill University, Montreal’s Minimum Cost Housing Group, taught a graduate seminar this summer on Edible Landscapes/Agricultural Urbanism. Students explored principles of introducing productive agricultural space in and around urban areas, building on Bhatt and McGill’s multi-year efforts in China, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Brazil and Canada exploring productive capabilities of edible landscapes. The work proceeds from a premise that an interest in sustainable living and local growing, coupled with an evolution of aesthetic values beyond traditional ornamental landscape sensibilities, can lead to transformed landscape, economy and ecological balance.

Mitch Glass comes to the School to teach Arch 321 Site + Environment, after serving as a Senior Associate at Sasaki Associates, Watertown for many years, and practicing  as a Senior Project Manager at the Chicago Park District, Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture in Chicago, and Hanna Olin in Philadelphia. He has worked on numerous leading projects in the US and abroad such as the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles while at Hanna/Olin; Lakeshore East Development while with the City of Chicago; and numerous master plans among other works in Jordan, Vietnam, India, UAE and several US locations. Glass is a registered landscape architect, and has taught at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, and the University of Illinois Chicago, and served as a guest critic at many universities.